things lacking in Squeak (RTF reader and writer)
Hannes Hirzel
hannes.hirzel.squeaklist at bluewin.ch
Tue Dec 16 21:39:51 UTC 2003
Hi Lex
Lex Spoon wrote:
> Duane Maxwell <dmaxwell at san.rr.com> wrote:
>
>>RTF is about the closest thing to a universally recognized rich text
>>format. Virtually every word processor reads and writes it, and there
>>are libraries for most programming languages available. Mac OS X uses
>>RTF as its primary rich text format - it's what's generated by
>>TextEdit, and Cocoa has an API for using it.
>>
>>It's very well documented, though I think that there are few complete
>>implementations. Format specification is here:
>>
>>http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/
>>dnrtfspec/html/rtfspec.asp
>>
>
>
> The last time I played with RTF was a few years ago, but it was a bad
> experience. I went on a jihad asking everynoe to use RTF, because it
> seemed like such a nice solution to the problem of portable word
> processing formats. However, it didn't work out. People sent me RTF's
> that none of my tools could could read. The problem was that RTF files
> generated by MS tools tended to included MS-specific objects in them.
> You'd be going through the file and see messages along the lines of
> "unparsable object excel210413".
The convention suggested in the specification is that RTF parsers should
ignore RTF code they cannot understand.
> Has this situation really changed? If not, then we can never expect to
> reliably import RTF. We can export stuff that is strictly conformant,
> but there are many of the existing tools that export stuff we will not
> be able to read.
Yes. But it would be already great to read and write basic RTF
- font selection
- style selection (bold, italics, underlined)
- font size
- font color
The specs for this have been pretty much the same for the last 10 years.
> To contrast, there are plenty of open formats around, many of which are
> older and better established than RTF. For word processing, there is
> TeX, SGML, HTML, and gee, plain old TEXT.
TeX and HTML would be fine.
SGML depends on a DTD, it may be relatively complex and SGML is not
widely used.
Text is already implemented ;-)
> Further, there are plenty of non-technical reasons to avoid things under
> MS's sponsorship and control. At any time MS may pull the plug and
> start emiting non-standard content, and they already have a long history
> of doing it!
MS has various products in various versions which deal with RTF as an
exchange format (even in the OS). They just cannot afford to become
incompatible with themselvelves...
> I'm astounded to learn that MacOS X is using this format widely.
And what does this tell us?
>
> In summary, I could see that it would be nice for Squeak to make a best
> effort to parse RTF if we are presented with it.
I agree. And it would be nice to have a little WordPad like editor in
Squeak. AFAIK the original Smalltalk system had something like that.
Hannes
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